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October 18, 2002
Impressionist
Scholar Robert Herbert to Lecture on Monet
Those
who love to travel but loathe the tourists who share their passion
will appreciate "Monet and the Tourist View," a lecture
by Robert Herbert, world-renowned impressionism scholar and MHC
Professor Emeritus of Fine Arts. Set for Friday, October 25, at
5 pm, in Clapp Hall's Hooker Auditorium, the lecture is cosponsored
by the Weissman Center for Leadership and the art department as
part of the Weissman Center's series Destinations: New
Meanings of Travel.
French impressionist Claude Monet frequently made paintings of
Europe's most popular tourist destinations but systematically
eliminated in those works all signs of tourism. Surrounded by
restaurants, hotels, inns, casinos, bathers, and landscapes cut
by artificial walkways, stairs, and railings in France's
coastal resorts, for example, he created uncluttered paintings
of pristine cliffs, unpeopled beaches, and empty seas. Herbert,
a social historian of art who analyzes not only the formal structure
(shapes, colors, brushwork, and composition) of art but also its
relationship to social beliefs and conditions, explains the paradox
this way: "Monet considered himself a poetic traveler, not
a tourist," says Herbert. "He created pictures that
allow the viewer to imagine being the only person looking at a
site, the ideal traveler who disdains the mere tourist (although
one of them)."
In his lecture, Herbert
will explore the theory and practice of tourism by focusing on
Monet's work between 1883 and1886 in Etretat, a coastal town
of Normandy, France, where he made seventy-five paintings that
depict a landscape quite different from the one found in photographs,
guidebooks, and popular prints of the same period. "We're
extremely fortunate to have in our neighborhood someone like Bob
Herbert," said Christopher Benfey, professor of English and
codirector of the Weissman Center. "He has gone more deeply
than any other scholar into Monet's ambivalent engagement
with tourism and travel."
One of the world's
leading experts on impressionist art, Herbert is a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical
Society, and has been named Officier dans l'Ordre des Arts
et des Lettres by the French government. He was chief curator
of the Georges Seurat retrospective at the Grand Palais and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1991 and has written numerous books,
including Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society
(1991), Monet on the Normandy Coast: Tourism and Painting,
1867–1886 (1994), Nature's Workshop: Renoir's
Writings on the Decorative Arts (2000), Seurat: Drawings
and Paintings (2001), and From Millet to Léger:
Essays in Social Art History (2002), all published by Yale
University Press. Soon to be published are three articles, one
titled "Millet, Courbet, and Theophile Thore," another
on a proposal of 1848 by a group of French artists for a radical
overhaul of the government's institution devoted to exhibiting
current art, and a third on art during the Franco-Prussian War.
His current work is the organization and catalog of an exhibition
devoted to the Art Institute of Chicago's famous painting
by Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.
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